Combatting Cheating

Friday, August 23, 2013

By dreeves

The second most puzzling thing about Beeminder, for those who don’t use it, is why people don’t lie to avoid paying us.
Here’s why!

Beeminder is foremost a Quantified Self tool, so it feels really wrong and counterproductive to falsify your data. People take a lot of pride in their graphs since it’s a meaningful visualization of their progress, and they’d rather pay the occasional penalty than mess that up.

When possible, they use an automatic data source, like connecting a Fitbit to Beeminder, or RunKeeper, or a Withings scale. (We list the automatic data sources on the front page of beeminder.com.)

If you link to your graph on your blog or at least send the URL out to friends by email then falsifying your data is like lying to your friends. (Ideally make the data public too — by default the graph is public but the data private.)

We try to encourage people to think of non-weaselliness as part of their identity as a Beeminder user. Like with this excerpt from our FAQ:

What makes Beeminder users so honest?
Self-selection! If you were the type who would falsify your data to weasel out of paying what you pledged on your yellow brick road then you would’ve rolled your eyes and walked away several paragraphs ago.

Recognize the value Beeminder provides. At the time you fail your goal you will have been forced (by Beeminder) to study for several weeks or months, more than you ever would have without it, so they’ve probably earned their money by that time.

Recognize the power of commitment contracts and realize that you want them to continue to have that power. If you cheat on a commitment contract it’s much harder to use them in the future.

Read more about the founders of Beeminder. … If you can put a face to the name it may make it psychologically harder to deprive them of money that they have rightfully earned.

His first is a point we’ve made
before
but it sounds much better coming from someone we don’t know. [1]
His second point is so baked into our way of thinking that it hadn’t occurred to us to articulate it.
And the last one is just for the aw shucks factor.

Start Here

Does Beeminder sound super crazypants? Just confusing? One of the first things you may want to check out is our User's Guide for New Bees. Check out other posts we're most proud of by clicking the "best-of" tag below. If you're a glutton for honey, the "bee-all" tag has everything we still think is worth reading. Other good ones are the "rationality" and "science" tags, if you're into that.

Akrasia

Akrasia (ancient Greek ἀκρασία, "lacking command over oneself"; adjective: "akratic") is the state of acting against one's better judgment, not doing what one genuinely wants to do. It encompasses procrastination, lack of self-control, lack of follow-through, and any kind of addictive behavior.
wikipedia.org/wiki/Akrasia